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Medicine

Indian Researchers Create a Raspberry-Pi-Based Device To Monitor Health (ieee.org) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the portability-is-key dept.
Two researchers in India have developed a new blood test that is simple, affordable, and easily deployed anywhere where a source of electricity is available. IEEE Spectrum reports: Sangeeta Palekar is a researcher at Shri Ramdeobaba College of Engineering and Management (RCOEM) who helped devise the new design. She and her colleague, Jayu Kalambe, understand how powerful a simple blood test can be. "Routine blood tests can help track and eliminate the threat of many potential diseases," explains Palekar, noting that blood tests make up roughly one-third of all pathology laboratory tests. [...] [The new analyzer] involves an automated fluid dispenser that adds a controlled amount of reagent into the blood sample. Light is then passed through the sample, and a Raspberry Pi computer analyzes the data. The system can be adapted to analyze any biochemical substances in the blood by simply modifying the reagent and spectral wavelength that's used. [...] When comparing the data obtained by their biochemical analyzer to the known results obtain by standard laboratory equipment, they found the data matched almost perfectly. What's more, the device could yield accurate results in just half a minute. The researchers describe the results in a study published in IEEE Sensors Journal.
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Indian Researchers Create a Raspberry-Pi-Based Device To Monitor Health More

Indian Researchers Create a Raspberry-Pi-Based Device To Monitor Health

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  • BASIC - take a photo after adding reagent (Score:3)

    by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @06:41AM (#61798005) Homepage Journal

    they add a reactive substance and take a photo of the result this is not cutting edge science nor anything new sensors wise

    the cheaper way is to place a drop onto a paper stick laced with the reagent and compare it to a chart using your eyes (which is how people do it currently) it would have been far more useful to develop a smartphone app to actually read these existing tests and give a more consistent and therefore accurate reading because the machine is doing it... but that would have actually been hard having to calibrate the chart and allow for fade within the paper and reagents so thats not done go for the easy win of pumping fresh reagent into a lightbox and using only 1 sensor.

    I do not see how this paper helpful or innovative.

    • "I do not see how this paper helpful or innovative."

      But it has a Raspberry-Pi, so evidently it's news for nerds, stuff that matters.

    • I am not sure the prevalence of raspberry pi devices but still good to see solutions based on material at hand. I am sure can always do better or maybe cheaper but in RURAL areas this could save lives. Not sure why so many naysayers versus encouragers. Maybe someone has shaft stuck up somwhere waiting for a diamond. +1 for female engineers and thinking outside the box.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        For the most part it's simple racism with a little bit of patriarchy thrown in. The developers are two women from India so the immediate assumption is that it's not worth anything, especially since there won't be a double digit markup that would make it an attractive product for the medical equipment corporations. If they had been from China instead the claim would be that they had just copied someone else's work.

        There are a lot of interesting low- to medium-tech developments coming out of India now as ed

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Have you actually read the paper?

      It's behind a paywall. Anyone got a free link?

    • With as many old flagship smartphones that get traded in, they could repurpose those to run these tests. Its usually the instrumentation thats special. Using your example, have you seen the latest commercials using clear blue easy EPT? They were notoriously hard to see that second line unless you were weeks late on your cycle. For those wanting to know early, its so faint you question if your seeing it or not. Now they use smart cameras to process the image. I could see some form of reactive paper with mult
  • As a Proof Of Concept this might pass muster, thats about it. There are better cheaper more reliable SOCs that can be implemented using Reduced Instruction Sets which are preferred for medical and safety systems when suitable. Why should people in developing societies have their health risked by inferior product design? Promoting this kind of fluffy bunkum will not result in better health outcomes for anyone.
    • "Inferior product design" is infinitely better than "no blood test available at all whatsoever" in a resource constrained situation. The whole point is to increase access for people who have none at all. Why make the perfect the enemy of the good here?
      • Not true. Just look at Theranos. If the false negative rate is sufficiently high you are putting people at risk. A secondary effect is that people stop trusting the medical system because the outcome is no different than not seeing the doctor.

        • trust.
          for simple minds.
          is being told what is good

        • That is a fair point, but I'd certainly like to get a better understanding with regard to the actual risk of false positives when following a proper user's guide for such a device before dismissing it out of hand. Unlike with Theranos, it doesn't seem to me like they're making any extraordinary claims here so far.
          • In medical screening, false positives are not bad because it will prompt action to verify the result. Medical screening tests are designed to have false positives in order to drive down the false negative rate. That way the test fails in a safe way.

            They have a long way to go before they have a product that is usable in the field.

      • equivalence.
        a bag of chicken bones.
        dice.
        and colored rocks.
        instructions inside

    • African villages, south american villages. Places where doctors without borders go. Something small, portable, and multitasking works out better. Something you can setup a tent with some portable solar panels or a small generator and do more meaningful diagnostics.

    • The high cost of medical devices are not from the technology. It is to cover legal.

      Considering a lot of medical devices are from technology that is over 30 years old, one would think that with Moore's Law that the $1 million piece of medical equipment would be under $1,000 today. However, the cost is needing a support staff ready 24/7 to fix any issues that may happen, as well a strong legal team to divert any complaint of the products back onto their customers even if the product is grossly inadequacy fo

  • Does anyone else see the irony between the sheer usefulness of this device compared to what Elizabeth Holmes over-promised [wikipedia.org] and is currently on trial for [duckduckgo.com]?

  • Why couldn't they use an Arduino for that? It's even cheaper and it runs on even less power.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suss ( 158993 )

      More people know about A Raspberri Pi, and they probably couldn't find code to copy off stackoverflow for this faux-invention.

    • Because although there are 10 thousand different variants of an ARM based microcomputer hobbyist platform out there, if you don't use a Raspberry Pi then you won't get mentioned in the geek press.

    • Rarely if ever the best technology is used for the right job.
      Raspberry Pi has some important features.
      1. It is easier to prototype, coding in C, or python or nearly any other language that you can get for Linux makes it easy to program and get something running fast.
      2. There are a lot of people who know how to use it, while a lot of people can use the Arduino, they are just a lot more who can use the Raspberry Pi
      3. A lot of easier documentation. There is a lot more documentation targeted towards beginners,

  • Yikes! (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @08:56AM (#61798221)

    The RPi is an unreliable, badly designed PoS. It is not fit to be used as anything but a toy. There are tons of professionally designed alternatives that actually work reliably and have competent designers instead of amateurs with delusions.

    • The RPi is adequate and cheap, especially the zero. It may not be the best device (certainly isn't, in fact) but they are cheap, available, and easily replaceable. There's no good reason not to use it so long as you stick to one of the common variants.

      • I always felt RPi was overpriced compared to a lot of its competition. It just has the bet marketing.

      • If your application is well thought-out, they're great.

        But you definitely want to go the extra mile to ensure you run everything in RAM instead of burning through SD cards, and you definitely want to make sure you're aware of how much heat your application causes the chip to generate and ensure it's adequately ventilated.

        I have a few of them because they're easy, fun, and not too expensive. They make great media centers and cheap desktops, and I also use them for flashing other hardware because there is AL

    • consider.
      is it good enough for this application

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      There are tons of professionally designed alternatives that cost enough to keep them out of reach of health centers throughout most of the developing world. My brother-in-law lives in a provincial capital in Peru, but if he needs a blood test he has to travel to Cusco to have it done because the local clinic can't afford a device that costs a couple thousand dollars. This device, when it's in production, should be not only inexpensive enough that it can be used in any village with a health center and mini

    • I respectfully disagree. Pi Zero is solid, so long as you use decent SD media (I like SanDisk's Edge A1). Other versions of Pi are powerful enough to have power and heat issues so you need to think more carefully about power supplies and cooling, but that's true for most computers. Personally, I really like the Zero: it's a computer similar to the UNIX systems I ran in the 90s, in the tiniest of power-sipping form factors, for not very much money.

  • It's a 'breakthrough' blood analyzer.

  • Name? (Score:2)

    by lazarus ( 2879 )

    I sure hope they end up calling this a Picorder...

  • ...supplies, some even do A1C and the whole thing fits in your pocket. For example Dario Blood Glucose Monitor Kit Test Your Blood Sugar Levels and Estimate A1c After 3m. Kit Includes: Glucose-Meter with 25 Strips,10 Sterile lancets (iPhone Lightning plug) - $19.90 with 10% off.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Apparently you missed the part where they intend to deploy this sort of device in India and the Third World. $19.90 is more than half the world's population earns in four days, for almost a billion people it's three week's worth of living expenses.

      Not everyone lives in Burbank.

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